How do we reclaim our innate enchantment with the world? And how can we turn our natural curiosity into a deep, abiding love for knowledge? Frank Oppenheimer, the younger brother of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, was captivated by these questions and used his intellectual inquisitiveness to found the Exploratorium, a powerfully influential museum of human awareness in San Francisco, which encourages play, creativity, and discovery—all in the name of understanding.

In Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole follows Frank Oppenheimer from his life as a physicist to his time as a cattle rancher to his founding of the Exploratorium in the hopes of promoting understanding and public participation in science as a response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result is a moving portrait of a dynamic and complex man who fundamentally changed the way we think about and teach science.